The web has developed dramatically over the past several years. It is now easier than ever for persons all around the world to communicate with each other and exchange personal information.
For example, social networking websites are popular ways of enabling persons having similar interests or activities to easily communicate with each other over the world wide web. Social networking services are primarily web-based and provide numerous ways for users to interact with each other. Modes of communicating as supported by a social networking service can include chatting, messaging, emailing, video playback, voice chatting, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups, and so on.
Certain social networking services enable a user to maintain a directory of contacts so that, upon visiting the social networking website, the user can keep track of his or her friends. Depending on the service, a directory can include identities of persons such as a group of former classmates, persons that are part of a club, chat room friends, etc. Thus, at least one service provided by a social networking website is the ability to manage a directory of friends or relations that also subscribe to the service. A respective service typically maintains a directory of “friends” for a corresponding subscriber as a private collection of contact information accessible only by the subscriber.
Although the directory of friends may be private, the personal information associated with the persons listed in a directory may be publicly available.
In certain cases, a user of a respective service needs a user name and password to log onto a social networking service. After authentication of the user by the service, the user can have access to his or her directory of friends. Thus, social networking services may provide at least some level of protection for private information even though subscribers' profiles are typically publicly available.
In addition to providing access to and use of a directory of friends, a social networking service can be configured to enable each of the users of the service to create a corresponding user profile (e.g., a web page of information) that is accessible by other users of the social networking service. Each subscriber can modify his or her profile to include personal or favorite information associated with the corresponding subscriber. As mentioned above, the profile information for each of the subscribers of the service may be publicly available to other users of the social networking service. In certain cases, a user profile can include contact information such as telephone, e-mail address, etc. for contacting the user. Special privileges may be required to access the contact information.
A user profile can also include accessible content or content links which the user has chosen to include as a part of his or her profile. For example, a profile can include text such as blogs, personal information, links to other web pages, etc. The content may also include various media, or links thereto, such as audio, video, FLASH® media files, and so on.
Upon visiting a social networking service, a user can access his or her directory of friends. If desired, the user can view profile information associated with the persons listed in the user's directory of friends by retrieving an information page associated with the selected friend or friends.